The Little PC That Could

January 12th, 2008 • Life, Technology
Tags: blogging, Life, Technology

I must be going lo-fi. For some reason I can’t nail, I want the £250 Asus Eee PC.

God knows why. The hard drive is tiny. The thing runs Linux, and to my knowledge I can’t add new apps if it runs out of steam. I’ve played with one for 10 mins, and the casework wears its plastic as a badge of honour.

Perhaps the source of the urge comes from my weariness with expensive flagships that are bloated with features that I will simply never, ever use.

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Blogs become ‘media properties’

October 2nd, 2007 • Media
Tags: blogging, publishing, web2.0

A new chart shows the power of blog-powered technology sites against traditional online media, with several home-spun players now giving the BBC and CNet a run for their dollar.If you’re a habitual consumer of technology sites, none of the findings will come as a shock. To my eyes, the real interest comes in the comment over at Read/Write Web…

I’ve been referring to Read/WriteWeb as a “media business” or a “media property”. R/WW used to be a blog, back when I was the only writer and I blogged in the evenings. But sometime last year, it became my full-time job. Then it became a business, and now it’s a media property. Let me clarify one thing though - I’m still a “blogger”, as are Marshall and Josh and the other R/WW writers. But Read/WriteWeb has evolved into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person.Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of blogging, also says that the voice must be unedited. This is clearly not the case with R/WW, which has multiple bloggers and also a strong editorial stance. The same is true at Techcrunch, Gigaom, PaidContent et al.  

Beyond Blogs: Old & New Media Converge

As an employee of an established publisher making its way in a new landscape (quite successfully, I should add), I find the fledging steps being taken by the New Blogs fascinating. The term ‘blog’ must be replaced soon: it is still tainted with the image of a loner in an attic recounting adventures with his Airfix kit to an audience of zero.

The New Wave is far closer in cut to traditional sources: the likes of ValleyWag and Read/Write Web are investigative and authoritative. Their writers live in their markets, and show care in providing a sound service for the reader. They are far closer to being specialist news services than they are blogs.

On a purely physical level, one thing that defines them as such is their page structures: a multi-post landing page, followed by linked single pages (unlike CNet or the Beeb, which are driven by industrial strength databases). I don’t doubt that the New Wave will ditch their restrictive formats, as soon as money allows.

There’s one other factor that distances them from traditional sources, namely the more pervasive inclusion of analysis. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for the mainstream press: the bloggers hitting prime time have kept their conversational approach, preferring to inject some of themselves into their tales.

At their worst, they vanish into internal debates that have no relevance to the audience. But at their best, they offer a narrative that purely objective news delivery cannot equal.

Microsoft: is there a lesson in there for everyone?

September 22nd, 2007 • Business, Internet
Tags: blogging, microsoft

A long rant by Robert Scoble delves into the lack of fizz from today’s Microsoft.He’s in a position to know: Scoble made his name as Microsoft’s chief blogger, in the process opening up parts of the company that would otherwise have remained secret (and arguably given it an even darker image than it has today).So when he says…

It’s been more than a year now since I left Microsoft. I really expected Ray Ozzie to come out and do lots of cool stuff for the Internet. But what did we get? A new design on live.com? Please.

Why doesn’t Microsoft get the love? « Scobleizer…it’s probably worth taking heed. In particular, he suggests that the senior team at Redmond could do worse than study Bungie, the development team behind the Halo franchise.By the time I’d reached the end of the post, my mind had switched to analysing our own successes - what were the ingredients that made things fly? First stab:

• Clarity: a single sheet that captures a market and need in under three paragraphs
• Chemistry: a group of people that compensate for each others’ failings, and in doing so form a greater whole
• Freedom: the space for that team to push it as far as it will go
• Confidence: managerial structures and support that exude faith

There are probably a thousand and one other factors, but every winner I’ve been lucky enough to have stood next to has ticked all three of those boxes.

Mr Web 2.0 on a new form of news breaking

August 30th, 2007 • Internet, Journalism, Media
Tags: blogging, Journalism, newspapers

Or is it so new? Tim O’Reilly (the chap credited with coining the term ‘Web 2.0′) tells of his admiration for one blogger’s handling of a breaking news story…Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken: “It wasn’t the subject of Scott’s story that stood out; it was the way he was telling it on his LaughingSquid blog. He reported the story by updating the blog over time. The practice is not unusual for bloggers. Revising or appending an update after the main or original story is fairly common. However, as this particular story grew and grew, Scott decided to keep adding more and more updates to the same blog post instead of creating new and separate posts each day.”He’s right, of course, but I work with an editor who does this every day, and has been for the last two years minimum.Her particular tipple is Formula 1, and I’ve always admired the way she pieces together race coverage as it happens - you can watch the jigsaw assemble as you hit the refresh button.An hour after the race is over, and you have a wonderful, completed picture. I’m not quite sure where I’m headed here: perhaps it’s to say that while O’Reilly’s praise is well placed, I’m unsure where the ground is being broken.